Adrienne Rich

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Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929–March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist, and feminist.

She was described as "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the twentieth century" and was credited with "the oppression of women and lesbians" being brought "to the forefront of poetic discourse. Rich criticized rigid models of feminist identities and praised what she called the "lesbian continuum" in terms of interfering and enriching women's lives.

The award of the Yale Series of Younger Poets was awarded to Auden.

Auden went on to write the introduction to the book.

She withdrew the National Medal of Arts in a's protest against House Speaker Newt Gingrich's decision to withdraw funds for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Early life and education

Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929, the younger of two sisters. At The Johns Hopkins Medical School, her father, pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was the chairman of pathology. Helen Elizabeth (Jones) Rich's mother was both a concert pianist and a composer. The father was from a Jewish family, and her mother was a Southern Protestant; the children were raised as Christians. Samuel Rice, the paternal grandfather of Koice in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a young boy from Koice (present day Slovakia), while his mother, a Sephardi Jew from Vicksburg, Mississippi, was a child of Artemi Jew. Samuel Rice owned a flourishing shoe store in Birmingham. Adrienne Rich's early poetic influence came from her father, who encouraged her to read but also to write her own poetry. Her interest in literature was ignited within her father's library, where she read books by authors like Ibsen, Arnold, Blake, Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tennyson. Her father was excited for Adrienne and said, "I want to create a prodigy." Adrienne Rich and her younger sister were homeschooled by their mother before Adrienne began public education in the fourth grade. Sources and After Dark chronicle her mother's marriage, in which she labored to fulfill her parents' hopes for her children, transitioning to a world in which she was supposed to excel.

Rich later attended Roland Park Country School, which she characterized as a "good old fashioned girls' academy [that] gave us fine role models of single women who were intellectually devoted." Rich earned her college diploma at Radcliffe College, where she concentrated on writing poetry and learning writing, but she encountered no women tutors at all. Rich's first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was nominated by senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1951, her last year at college; she went on to write the introduction to the new volume. Rich earned a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford for a year following her graduation. Following a trip to Florence, she decided not to return to Oxford but rather spent her remaining time in Europe researching Italy and exploring Italy.

Later life: 1976–2012

Rich began her relationship with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff in 1976, which lasted until her death. Rich's book "Experience and Institution, published the same year, revealed that lesbianism, as well as personal, was a political problem." Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was integrated into the following year's Dream of a Common Language (1978), was the first concrete expression of lesbian emotion and sexuality in her writing, especially in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of her late poems in The Fact of a Doorframe (2001). As she (Rich) crossed a threshold into a newly constellated life and a "new relationship with the universe," Adrienne Rich's analysis: the time of change. Rich also wrote several key socioeconomic papers during this period, including "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," one of the first to address lesbian existence. "How and why women's choice of women as compassionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, partners, and the LGBT community has been stifled, intimidated, and coerced into hiding" in this essay. Any of the essays were republished in On Lies, On Lies, Mystics, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1979). Rich argued for her sexuality and played a part in women's liberation in integrating such pieces into her work.

Rich served as an English professor at City College and Rutgers University from 1976 to 1979. She received an honorary doctorate from Smith College in 1979 and moved with Cliff to Montague, Massachusetts. Eventually, they migrated to Santa Cruz, where Rich continued their studies as a scholar, lecturer, writer, and essayist. Rich and Cliff took over editorship of Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian arts journal (1981-1983). Rich taught and lectured at UC Santa Cruz, Scripps College, San Jose State University, and Stanford University during the 1980s and 1990s. Rich served as an A.D. White Professor-At-Large for Cornell University from 1981 to 1987. Rich's Life (1986), Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), and Time's Wealth: Poems 1985-1988 (1989). Ruth Paul Lilly Poetry Prize (1986), the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters from NYU, and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry (1989).

Rich became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press in 1977 (WIFP). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing group. The group is working to improve female communication and bridge the public with the help of women in media.

Janice Raymond, a feminist biography of her 1979 book "The Transsexual Empire" thanked Rich for her "constant support" and referred to her in the book's chapter "Sappho by Surgery." LGBT and feminist commentators have called "the Transsexual Empire" to be transphobic, and several have chastised Rich for her role in and support of the production. Although Rich never explicitly mentioned her support for Raymond's work, Leslie Feinberg cites Rich as being helpful during Feinberg's writing of Transgender Warriors.

Rich was still using canes and wheelchairs as a result of her rheumatoid arthritis in the early 1980s. Rich, who was diagnosed with the disease at the age of 22, has kept her disability private for decades. Rich and Cliff decided to settle in California rather than in New England due to the cold air in New England. Rich had to wear a metal halo screwed into her head after a 1992 spinal surgery.

Rich gave a talk in Utrecht, Netherlands, entitled Notes Toward a Politics of Location, at the International Conference of Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in June 1984. Her keynote address is a semi-length study on location politics and the emergence of the term "locatedness" in the field. Rich, who speaks at a place where women live, hopes to reclaim feminine thought and expression with the female body, primarily with the intention of reclaiming the body by verbalizing self-presentation. Rich begins the address by stating that although she speaks these words in Europe at this time, she has searched for these words in the United States, further focusing on location. She acknowledges her place in an essay on the evolution of the women's movement, not limited to just women in her Providence, and she expresses her dissatisfaction with all women. Rich not only draws a global audience of women, but more importantly, she invites all women to consider their existence. Rich invites women to explore where they themselves were created by visualizing geographic locations on a map as history and as a place where women are born. Rich advises the audience not to begin with a continent, country, or house, but rather start with the geographical area nearest to them, which is their body. Members of the audience and readers of the newspaper are, therefore, challenged by a wealth that cannot be defined by national, ethnic, or home. The essay explores where the women's movement should be at the end of the twentieth century. Rich explores how the movement for reform is an extension of itself in an encouraging call for the women's movement. The movement, which has de-masculinized itself and de-Westernized itself, has morphed into a critical mass of so many different voices, languages, and general actions. She has pleaded that the movement must change in order to see change. Women must change it, according to her. Rich explores how one's background can influence their identity. She supports this belief by denying her own discovery of the body, her body, as female, as white, and as a body in a region. Rich is careful to specify the city in which her writing takes place. Rich refers to the concept of location throughout her essay. From verbal and written evidence of Black United States citizens, she explains how the women's movement in the Western culture is limited to white women's fears. Such careers have allowed her to experience the meaning of her whiteness as a point of location for which she was required to take responsibility. She later published the essay in her prose collection Blood, Bread, and Poetry in 1986.

Rich's involvement with the New Jewish Agenda resulted in the establishment of Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends in 1990, a journal of which Rich served as the editor. This research linked to the study of private and public histories, particularly in the case of Jewish women's rights. An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Barbara McDonagh's book in Poetry and the Lenore Marshall/Nation Award as well as the Poet's Prize in 1993 and the Commonwealth Award in Literature, was her next published work. Rich became an active participant of several advisory boards including the Boston Women's Fund, National Writer's Union, and Sisterhood in South Africa during the 1990s. "We may be devastated how little our poems will do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological control and seemingly limitless corporate greed," the poet wrote, but it has always been true that poetry can move us to ourselves, remind us of beauty where no one appears to exist," she said. Rich received the MacArthur Fellowship and Award in July 1994, specifically for her work as a poet and writer. Rich became a grandmother to Julia Arden Conrad and Charles Reddington Conrad in 1992.

Rich declined the National Medal of Arts in 1997, protesting House of Representatives' rejection to withdraw the National Endowment for the Arts as well as policies regarding the Clinton Administration's policies regarding the arts generally and literature in particular, saying that "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House simply decorates the dinner table of the power's hostage." Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998 (1999), and Poems 1998–2000 (2001).

Rich was instrumental in the early 2000s, protesting the danger of war in Iraq, both via readings of her poetry and other events. Louise Glück, Heather McHugh, Rosanna Warren, Robert Creeley, and Michael Palmer were among the newly elected chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2002. She received the 2003 Yale Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and was lauded by the panel for her "come comprehension, humane, her deep research, and her constant poetic exploration and recognition of multiple selves." Rich's work was recognized by the Equality Forum in October 2006, who named her as a symbol of LGBT history.

Rich, despite initially having reservations about the movement, called for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, condemning "the Occupation's denial of Palestinian humanity, the destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods, and the state's physical and mental walls against dialogue."

Rich died in her Santa Cruz, California home on March 27, 2012, at the age of 82. Pablo Conrad, her son, announced that her death was caused by long-term rheumatoid arthritis. Her last collection was published the year before her death. Rich was aided by her sons, two grandchildren, and her partner Michelle Cliff.

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Early career: 1953–75

Rich married Alfred Haskell Conrad, a Harvard University economics professor who attended as an undergraduate, in 1953. "I married in part because I knew no better way to divorce from my first family," she said of the match. I wanted what I saw as a complete woman's life, whatever was possible." They settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had three children. "A lot of the poems are very derivative," she said in 1955, when she launched The Diamond Cutters, a series in which she said she wished she had not been published, citing a "pressure to produce again... to make sure I was still a poet." The Poetry Society of America also awarded the Ridgely Torrence Memorial Award in that year. (David), 1957 (Pablo), and 1959 (Jacob) Her three children were born in 1955 (David).

Rich's life in the 1960s began with her second Guggenheim Fellowship to work at the Netherlands Economic Institute (1961), and a Bollingen Foundation grant for the translation of Dutch poetry (1962). Rich's third collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, was a more personal effort examining her female identity in the 1950s, indicating a dramatic shift in Rich's style and subject matter. Rich's essay "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity," she writes in 1982, "the experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me." The book has received scathing feedback. "I was seen as 'bitter' and 'personal,'" she says, and to be disqualified would have been disqualified, which was very shocking because I had gone out on a limb... I knew I'd been slapped over the wrist, but I didn't attempt it again for a long time."

Rich became heavily involved in anti-war, civil rights, and feminist activism in New York in 1966. Her husband taught at City College of New York. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, promising to forego tax payments in the fight against the Vietnam War. Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971) are among her collections from this period, which show increasingly radical political content and a growing interest in poetic form.

Rich taught at Swarthmore College and taught at Columbia University School of the Arts as an adjunct professor in the Writing Division from 1967 to 1969. In addition, she began teaching in the SEEK program at City College of New York in 1968, a role she continued until 1975. Rich received the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry Magazine during this period. The anti-war and Black Panther fundraising parties were held at Rich and Conrad's apartment. Rich moved out in mid-1970 and found herself in a tiny studio apartment nearby, sparking tensions. Conrad went into the woods and shot himself in October, widowing Rich.

She was the winner of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1971 and spent the next year and a half teaching at Brandeis University as the Hurst Visiting Professor of Creative Writing. The fall of America, a series of exploratory and often threatening poems, splits the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry with Allen Ginsberg. Rich was invited by two other feminist writers, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, to accept it on behalf of all women "who have spoken and go unheard in a patriarchal world." Rich took up the position of Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the following year.

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